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The body of work Struth made in places of worship in different
cultures around the world developed over a number of
years. The genesis of these works can be seen in some of the
Museum Photographs, which included people looking at religious
paintings in museums.

Growing out of his work in 1990 at the Pantheon in
Rome, between 1995 and 2003 Struth made an ‘extended family’
of works in temples, churches, cathedrals and tourist sites
which incorporated groups of people who had come to these
places as cultural tourists or religious believers: places which,
in Struth’s eyes, offer “monumental emotional packages of overwhelming
experience.”

In San Zaccaria, Venice (1995) Struth constructed his
composition around the central figures of the Madonna and
Child in Giovanni Bellini’s Sacra Conversazione and included
a number of visitors involved in different acts of looking, from
aesthetic to religious contemplation. Struth had been introduced
to Bellini’s painting by the Scottish art historian Giles Robertson,
the subject of two of Struth’s earliest portraits.

Robertson
had published an important monograph on Bellini in 1968 in
which the Sacra Conversazione was the frontispiece. Struth
had become fascinated by the presence of the painting in its
original setting whilst spending some time in Venice in 1990
in residence at the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani.

“Looking at works which had not been isolated from their original
context, which were still in the place and perhaps in the belief
system for which they had originally been made, stimulated new
possibilities. Having been raised as a Catholic I was reluctant to
expand my work from the realm of art-historical museums into
the domain of the religious.”

In 1998 Struth made a number of works in places of
Christian worship including Milan Cathedral and Monreale in
Palermo. In 1999 he returned to the Buddhist temple complex at
Nara in Japan which he had first visited in 1996 and made photographs
inside T-odai-ji, the Great Buddha Hall. In 2003 he reprised
the composition of San Zaccaria, Venice with the figure of
Madonna at the centre in Iglesia di San Francesco, Lima during
his first visit to Peru.

He also made a number of works juxtaposing
the imposing exteriors of religious buildings such as Milan
Cathedral, Notre Dame in Paris and T-odai-ji in Nara with the
diminutive groups of people on the ground beneath them.

Struth broadened his enquiry into the relationship
between image and ideology in a number of works made in sites
of powerful secular significance. These include Tien An Men,
Beijing (1997) with the famous portrait of Chairman Mao at its
centre and Times Square, New York (2000) dominated by the
huge image of an anonymous woman on an advertising screen.

On a road trip through Nevada and California in 1999, Struth
decided to visit the famous granite rock formation El Capitan in
the Yosemite National Park, familiar to him through the work
of 19th-century photographers such as Carleton Watkins and
Eadweard Muybridge. Struth photographed the drive-by tourists
who have stopped to experience and photograph this symbolic
national monument, an iconic form with an ideological charge
of a different kind.